This is the basic presentation of placement flow which was prepared by me.

1. PLACEMENT
PHYSICAL DESIGN

2. Prerequisite
• Must be aware of the floor planning and
the power planning concepts.
• Must be aware of the commonly used
terms and basic design.
• This presentation will help you to get the
placement related knowledge of a design.

3. GOALS
• Design goals can be timing, power and area.
• Guarantee the router can complete the
routing step
• Minimize all the critical net delays
• Make the chip as dense as possible

4. DISCUSSIONS
• What is placement and its need in physical
design.
• What is pre, in, post placement optimization
stages.
• Additional constraints to improve placement
related issues.

5. ZERO INTERCONNECT TIMING ANALYSIS
• Before you start with placement:
 Perform a 'Timing Sanity Check' or ‘zero
interconnect timing analysis’.
 Check the violations
If zero violations : Continue on to
placement
If still violating: Go back to Synthesis!

6. Placement flow in the physical design
Design setup and
floor plan data
Detach scan chain
Set Placement
options
Auto place
Congestion
OK ?
Timing
OK ?
Perform ctsAdditional
optimization
NO
YES
YES
No

7. SCAN CHAIN HANDLING
• Disconnect the scan chains prior to placement to focus on the
functional critical paths.
• If serially connected FFs are placed far apart this may require a lot
more routing resources than necessary.
• If FFs are placed close together, according to their scan chain
ordering, this may hurt timing along functional critical paths.
• Scan chains will be reconnected after CTS
 Same grouping of FFs
 Different ordering: based on placement, to minimize
routing resources

8. Specify
• The Place menu’s Specify forms enable you to specify and
assign spare cells, scan cells, JTAG cells, and placement
blockage for power and ground stripes. You must assign
these objects before running placement.
• The Specify submenu provides access to the following
features:
 Spare cells
 Cell paddings
 Jtag cells
 Placement blockages

9. PLACEMENT
• Before the start of placement optimization all Wire Load
Models (WLM) are removed. Placement uses RC values
from Virtual Route (VR) to calculate timing.
• VR is the shortest Manhattan distance between two
pins.
• VR RCs are more accurate than WLM RCs.
• Placement is performed in four optimization phases:
 Pre-placement optimization
 In placement optimization
 Post Placement Optimization (PPO) before clock tree synthesis
(CTS)
 PPO after CTS.

10. PRE PLACEMENT OPT
• Optimizes the netlist before placement, HFNs are
collapsed.
• It can also downsize the cells.

11. IN PLACEMENT OPT
• Re-optimizes the logic based on VR.
• This can perform cell sizing, cell moving, cell
bypassing, net splitting, gate duplication, buffer
insertion, area recovery.
• Optimization performs iteration of setup fixing,
incremental timing and congestion driven
placement.

12. PPO BEFORE CTS
• Before CTS performs netlist optimization with
ideal clocks.
• It can fix setup, hold, max trans/cap violations.
• It can do placement optimization based on
global routing.
• It re does HFN synthesis.

13. PPO AFTER CTS
• After CTS optimizes timing with propagated
clock.
• It tries to preserve clock skew.

14. What Does it mean if TNS >>WNS?
• A large TNS implies that there could be many
sub-critical violations that are almost as bad as
the critical path violation.
• It is also possible that these paths are related
or share logic.
• We can verify by analyzing the sub-critical
paths with detailed timing reports.

15. What does Optimization Do By Default?
• By default, logic optimization during
placement works only on the critical path
of each clock domain, and stops when it
cannot further improve its timing.
• Sub-critical paths are not optimized in this
stage of optimization.

16. Critical Range Optimization
• Critical Range Optimization (CRO) works on
the sub critical paths, which reduces the
total number of violations paths and the
TNS.
• CRO may also help to reduce the critical
path violations if it is 'related‘ to some of
the sub-critical paths

17. Goals for placement optimization
• Performance : Such as Timing
• Logical DRC’S
• Routability or congestion
• Area
• Leakage Power

18. Some commands used in cadence